


Traditions

by josephides



Category: Alpha and Omega - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Ridiculous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27762424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephides/pseuds/josephides
Summary: “I cannot leave, my girl, until the issue is resolved. Is he it? This one? I told you, you would come to regret him.” An aggressive finger was pointed in Bran's direction.
Relationships: Bran Cornick/Leah Cornick
Comments: 22
Kudos: 158





	Traditions

**Author's Note:**

> This is really very, very daft.

Leah walked into the living area with a hamper on her hip and stopped to sneeze six times.

“ _Gesundheit_ ,” Bran said, smiling, as other members of the pack murmured similar well wishes. She had a particularly amusing sneeze, something akin to a mouse more than a wolf.

Holding her hand to her mouth, Leah looked suspiciously around the room. Werewolves had sensitive noses and could often be triggered by heavily scented things – flowers, cleaning products, some perfumes. As far as Bran was aware, nothing like that had been newly introduced to their home, certainly nothing he could smell.

“Damn,” she muttered, very quietly, suddenly looking quite cross.

He put down his magazine properly to give her his full attention. “Something wrong?”

Her transparent face quickly cleared. “No, no, nothing.” Leah shook her head, ponytail swaying wildly, and made her way upstairs. “Lunch will be ready in fifteen.”

Since he had been the only one to notice her apprehension, Bran was also the only one to notice the lie.

*

It might surprise many but for the most part Bran and Leah worked well together. Like many long-lived couples, they had their ups and their downs and, whilst yes, these tended to peak higher and lower than most, Bran liked to think that their partnership endured because of a true understanding of each other.

He snuck upstairs, increasingly aware as he did so that she was speaking to someone in her bedroom. He paused in the hall to listen. Was she on the phone? No, he had seen her cell phone on the mantelpiece. She lost it several times a day and would frequently march into his office and ask him to call it for her. He had learnt to keep an eye on it.

Whoever she was talking to, she was doing so in the angry, hushed voice she sometimes used with him when they disagreed and she didn’t want the pack to overhear. Bran had no such qualms. When he raised his voice, he didn’t care who heard it. 

After a moment, he could establish the second voice. A male voice. He sounded equally angry. Bran could only catch every other word, not enough to hear properly what the argument was about.

Whoever this man was, he had obviously accessed Leah’s bedroom without Bran’s knowledge. A strange man in his wife’s bedroom; Bran wasn’t pleased.

Since the door of her bedroom was closed and he wished to remain stealthy, Bran walked through his room, through the open connecting door, moving silently. Not silently enough because both Leah and whomever she was talking to suddenly stopped.

“Leah, who are you speaking to?” he addressed the entrance of the walk-in closet in her bedroom.

His wife stepped into view. She was still holding the hamper from earlier and her cheeks were flushed. “Ah…”

Not used to Leah prevaricating, Bran walked into the closet with her. There was no one there, just the neat organization of her clothing – all open to view, with nowhere for anyone to hide. He was simultaneously relieved and concerned. “Who was it?” he asked again. Someone with the ability to vanish? Or, more logically, did she have a second cell phone that he was unaware of? That was a troubling thought.

“Um.” She shifted the hamper nervously, her eyes not quite meeting his. “It’s… hard to explain.”

Bran raised his eyebrows. “I strongly suggest you try.”

Clearly very flustered, she put the hamper down on the floor and proceeded to speak in a way that made her look incredibly guilty. “It’s, well. The thing is… um.” She wrung her hands. “It’s like this, Bran… You see, I— _oh_.”

“For goodness sakes, girl!”

Bran instinctively grabbed Leah and yanked her behind him as the voice – and the owner of said voice – manifested in the closet with them. Small, no taller than Bran’s knee, and stocky, he had a long, fluffy white mane of hair that merged into a long, equally fluffy beard. Two dark eyes, like raisins, glowered up at Bran. He was wearing something like a white smock.

“Fae,” Bran concluded, lips curling backwards. Then he sneezed. Twice.

“ _No_ ,” Leah said, expertly escaping his grip and rubbing her wrist where he had pulled at her hard. “He’s a household guardian.”

“A _Lares_?” Bran demanded. Not fae but a minor deity. A _Roman_ household guardian. “Why is— is he _your_ household guardian?” He sneezed again. 

“Bless you.” His wife looked uncomfortable. “Yes. Technically.”

The Lares rolled his eyes. “Nothing technical about it, _anaticula_.”

Bran blinked and felt a slow smile spread across his face. Extraordinary. “Did he just call you ‘duckling’?”

“ _He_ is going now,” Leah said through her teeth, glaring daggers at the minor god in her walk-in closet. “ _Aren’t you?_ ”

The small man positively vibrated with annoyance. “I’m telling you, _you_ called _me._ ”

His mate let out a noise of barely contained fury, fists clenched at her sides. “I did _no such thing_.”

Clearly, this was the argument Bran had been overhearing.

“I cannot leave, my girl, until the issue is resolved. Is he it? This one? I told you, you would come to regret him.” An aggressive finger was pointed in his direction.

Bran got a strange, tingling sensation in his throat. He attempted to clear it but found he was unable to draw air to it, through it, or otherwise use his airways. He was, and this was challenging, no longer breathing.

“Stop it! Stop it at once!” Leah yelled, bending down to shout in the little god’s face. “He’s not the issue. There is no issue! Stop _killing him_. Leave him _alone._ ”

Ah, Bran thought, that’s what that was. Suddenly, the tingling sensation withdrew and cool, clean air rushed to his lungs. “That was an experience,” he murmured, touching fingers to his chest lightly, inhaling and exhaling with relief. The wolf spirit within stirred malevolently, now sensing a greater threat that he had previously perceived.

“Hmm,” the Lares said, narrowing his eyes at Bran. He then vanished.

At his side, Leah sagged against the shelves on her left. “Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

Delicately, Bran cleared his throat. “Wrong religion, I think.”

*

Leah was uncommunicative. Silently, she served up lunch to a motley collection of their pack, all of whom were aware that something was up but were not clear on the details. They had all no doubt heard Leah scream and Juste had been standing at the base of the stairs when they had descended, worry etched on his face.

Bran forked up his pasta, seated opposite his mate as she pushed her food around disinterestedly, their pack trying to hold up conversational topics. Of course, Bran had lived through the Roman annexing of Great Britain but his memories of that time were hazy, at best, and certainly didn’t include the practical knowledge of their religious beliefs before Christianity took over. All he had was what he had learnt and read of later during his periods of intense mythological study. From what he recalled, Lares came in many forms but presumably the one that Leah ‘had’ was a domestic one, the one that protected the household and its occupants.

And he was powerful. He touched his throat, thoughtfully. Tremendously powerful.

That the Lares were not a myth did not come as a great surprise to Bran. Any figure – real or imagined – worshipped to the degree that the household gods had been could conceivably lead to a manifestation. Human belief was powerful – the crosses that every member of his pack wore about their necks were testament to that.

But Leah was not human. 

He had many questions, none of which would be answered whilst the pack was here.

After lunch, everyone cleared the house without him needing to convey this request. He stalked his mate down in the laundry room at the back. ‘Room’ being something of a misnomer as it was actually a suite of rooms so well equipped she could well have opened up her own cleaning business.

She glanced up at him when he entered and continued to fold towels. The last full moon they’d had two days ago had been a wet and wild one. Most of the pack had returned muddy and been hosed down outside, with much laughter, and then Leah had handed out endless fluffy towels. He watched her roll them up and tuck in the ends, waiting.

“I didn’t call him,” she said, eventually.

This was the very least of his questions but he took it for the opening it was. “What does that mean?”

“If a member of the family has a _domestic_ problem, we can call upon him. I didn’t. I don’t have a problem,” she all-but-growled.

Domestic was quite broad-ranging, then, given apparently Bran himself was included in this. That if he was _domestically_ a problem, Leah could ask the Lares to remove him. “Have you ever called him before?”

Leah sighed, pushed the towels on the counter to the left and then bent down to pull more from the drier. Her cheeks were a delicate pink. “Here? Once.”

“When?”

Nervously, she tucked her hair behind her ears. A habit of hers, made all the more obvious when – like today – she had her hair tied back and there was no free hair to tuck. “Shortly after we were married.”

Purely to occupy himself with something other than staring at her, Bran began to arrange the already rolled towels into a neat, stacked triangle. “What kind of domestic issue did you call upon him to solve?” he asked casually, racking his brains for anything that might have happened in the early years of their marriage that stuck out at all. That this _deity_ had been in Bran’s orbit and he hadn’t known of it.

“I couldn’t _do_ anything. So he came and helped.” Leah cleared her throat. She was embarrassed. “He just taught me how to do things.”

This was not illuminating. “Do what?” he asked, trying to keep his tone gentle.

Leah gave him a scathing look. “ _Domestic_ things. I don’t know. Cook? Clean? Wash your clothes? Mend your shirts? Any of the things you and Sam and Charles needed?”

Bran stared at her. “I didn’t… hmm,” he said. _I didn’t marry you for that._ He stopped himself from saying it because it was the type of comment that would hurt her and he did try, he really did try, not to hurt her like that. Not if he could avoid it.

But, plainly and simply, Bran had married her for the mating bond. For her patent capabilities as a werewolf female who could learn to defend herself. He hadn’t wanted – or needed – a wife in the traditional sense. He and Sam and Charles had been fine without her.

She seemed to get an inkling of where his thoughts had gone. Her hands moved more quickly, with more annoyance, folding and then rolling up the towel. “That house you lived in was disgusting and we ate like wild animals. _You_ might not have cared, I mean, you were very depressed so why would you, but every person who walked in looked at me like I was some kind of slattern. It was _my_ responsibility and I had not been raised to… to work like that. I knew how to embroider samplers and dance and someone _else_ made my clothes and we had _servants_ and…” She stopped, pressing her lips together.

A memory formed of the first time Bran had seen Leah. It had been in Boston, of course. The Boston pack could not have been more different than his own. The Alpha was a weak-willed sycophant who came from money. His mate was a simpering human. Were it not for Bran’s potent power, and the gold he carried, he would have had no doubt that he would have been refused an audience.

He had been away from home off and on for nearly two years, on his search for a very particular type of female to make the mating bargain with. Someone who would be the polar opposite of his previous mate – that he knew for certain. He also had an unshakeable belief within him that he would know it when he saw her.

And there she had been, in this Boston pack of werewolves-in-name-only. The simpering human mate of the Alpha had introduced them, tittering with derision at Bran’s manner of dress. _Leah, dearest, this is Bran Cornick. As you can see, he’s a very long way from home and quite wild._

Leah herself had been clad in the height of ladies’ fashion for the time. Head to toe in a blue gown no doubt picked to match her eyes, with ridiculous sleeves and elaborate beading. And she had been utterly ignorant. Fierce, no question, but lacking in education – as he admitted most women were those days - and even any interest in personal improvement. Everything she cared of was superficial. Money and looks, power and hierarchy.

She had been exactly what he had been looking for. Someone he thought he could dislike and never love. 

“You told me you were bored,” he murmured, the memory crystalizing. She had leaned very close to him as she said it and had smelled like the fruit punch all the women were drinking, as well as something tart. He later learnt that she used lemon juice to lighten her hair, allowing him to add vanity to the list of negatives that he had been tallying up with a feeling close to glee. “That the Frontier sounded exciting.”

“I meant _you_. You were exciting.” She was cross with herself. “I was an idiot.”

“Huh.” Abruptly, Bran realized that they had been derailed. Their meeting and mating was not a topic they ever spoke of. It had been quite long enough in the past now that other things had become more memorable. Yet he put a pin in it to think on later. “And the household god? Where— how is he tied to you?”

Leah’s top lip curled. “He’s just always been there.” She looked around subversively. “And now he’s here. I didn’t call you!” she shouted into the ether.

There was no response.

Something she said came back to Bran, then. “What do you mean I was depressed?”

Leah treated him to another scathing look and began to put the towels into a hamper, taking down his neat little tower. “Just what I said. You were depressed. I didn’t realize it at the time, it wasn’t really something we knew about, but it’s obvious to me now, looking back.” She exhaled and it was a long, shaky sound. “Being with me made you sad. I just reminded you of everything you had lost.”

Bran opened his mouth and… didn’t know what to say. She was probably right. It was remarkably observant of her. He brushed her cheek with his index finger. “You know I don’t feel like that now.”

She gave him a wide, false smile that never reached her eyes and picked up the hamper. “That’s nice to know.”

*

The rest of the afternoon, Leah returned to being uncommunicative, answering any of his further questions with terse responses, predominantly, “I really don’t know, Bran.”

She wasn’t lying, which Bran found absolutely astonishing. If it had been him, he would have devoted _considerable_ time learning everything there was to know if he had his own personal deity whose responsibility was to ensure his domestic happiness.

But Leah was not like that. She didn’t interrogate. She just accepted it as fact and moved on.

Bran went through his library, looking for any reference materials to Ancient Roman mythology, combing through what they had on household gods. Then he turned to the internet, always a bit hit and miss, and tracked through Wikipedia sources and academic articles. He ordered a few books from Amazon, too. Just in case.

His mate rolled her eyes at him when she delivered him a slice of cake late afternoon. It was a vanilla sponge and was light and airy and delicate. Helplessly, Bran wondered if the Lares had taught her how to make it. He definitely remembered eating it in their first house which – apparently – had been disgustingly dirty. He shook his head. He really couldn’t remember that. He would have to ask someone who had been around then. Tag, perhaps. Or Sam, wherever he was now. Charles would have been too young, surely, to remember. 

“I don’t understand why he’s not always here. Surely there are plenty of domestic problems he could tend to?”

“My father always impressed upon us to try and solve our problems ourselves rather than resorting to using Lars unnecessarily.”

He was amused. “Lars?”

“Obviously,” she said drily.

Bran continued to be amused. _Lars_. “You make it sound as if he might resent it.”

Leah pulled a face. “Wouldn’t you?”

He waved his fork at her. “ _I’m_ not an all-powerful deity.” Ignoring his mate’s look of _aren’t you?,_ Bran ate the last mouthful of cake and sighed, sad it was over. “Does he come when you call immediately? Or is there a delay?”

“Not usually. Definitely in a day or less. Can be as quickly as a few minutes,” she added.

“Then presumably if you called him, which I’m not saying you did,” Bran said hurriedly as her eyes kindled. Pride, obviously, was the reason she didn’t want him to think she called for help. “But _in theory_ if you had called him, it could have been this morning. Did anything unusual happen this morning?”

She shook her head. At some point, she had tied her hair on top of her head into a big, messy knot. That usually meant she had gone for a run, which she often did when she wanted to think something through. Or after they’d had a disagreement. Sometimes when she was upset, he actively suggested she went for a run so that she could be clearer with him when she returned. It was how he had discovered that she had loved Carter Wallace like a father and hadn’t known how to process her heartbreak. She had all but resolved never to love any of their humans ever again. 

He thought about their day. It had been as normal a Saturday as they tended to be. They’d woken up together, talked for a little while in bed before showering and dressing. Yesterday had been unremarkable as well. “Full moon?” he suggested, at a stretch.

Again, she shook her head. “I don’t know, Bran,” she said once more. She picked up his plate and fork and made to leave.

“Could he really kill me? Just like that?”

Leah paused and then, without turning to look at him, quietly said, “If I believe he can. Yes.”

*

Bran did not sleep well. Leah had given him much to think on and not all of it was related to the mystical being who may or may not be ‘living’ in his house. He also – and this was perhaps purely psychological – had the distinct feeling that he was being watched.

He gave up just before four in the morning and decided to visit his sleeplessness on his wife.

Leah, it seemed, was not suffering. He woke her and she peered balefully at him as he inserted himself into the cocoon of her bedding. “Is he watching us now?” Bran asked.

Eyelids firmly shut once more, she made a considering noise. “It’s more… watching over. It’s not specific.”

Bran gave in and put his arms around her. She was warm and soft, muscles relaxed with sleep. She smelled like him, as well, a fact that he found comforting on a deeply primal level, as if she carried the imprint of him around with her. As was sometimes the way, now that they were close, Bran felt himself becoming drowsy. _Should have done this earlier._

The next time he opened his eyes, the edges of the drapes were tipped with the gold of morning sunlight. Leah was half-sitting up in bed, frowning at her cell phone. Her expression cleared when she saw he was awake.

“Good morning,” she said, rubbing her foot against his calf.

Taking this for the invitation it was, Bran dragged her down the bed to kiss her. She tasted of toothpaste and he sucked on her tongue, wondering why they didn’t always start their mornings with sex. Surely an invigorating start to any day?

They both froze when they heard the doorbell.

“Maybe they’ll go away if we ignore them,” Leah suggested, breath warm on his neck, hips rubbing against him, doing her very best to be distracting.

Bran arched into the nails she ran down his back. The doorbell went again and once he could ignore, twice might be an emergency. “Stay exactly where you are,” he instructed, sliding out of bed.

She pouted at him and rolled onto her front, cuddling a pillow. “Be quick or I’ll see to myself.”

Bran did _not_ stumble at the thought of her ‘seeing’ to herself. He pulled on a robe and ran down the stairs, knowing before he reached the door that it was Charles. “Is it urgent?” he asked, opening the door.

Charles looked surprised. “No?”

“Come back in an hour,” Bran told him, then changed his mind. “No. Two.”

His son’s mouth twitched. “I see.” And something in his tone of voice told Bran that Charles saw _exactly_ so he closed the door in his son’s knowing face and the reinforcement that yes, Charles, sometimes he was just a man, and ran back upstairs.

As he had anticipated, Leah had started to see to herself and for a moment he stood watching her touch herself, utterly transfixed, before he pulled himself together and joined in.

Afterwards – quite a long time afterwards – Bran lifted his head from where he was dozing under her armpit. “What time is it?”

She reached blindly for her cell phone to consult it. “Just before noon.”

“Impressive,” he murmured.

“You didn’t sleep very well.” She stroked his hair. “And it is Sunday so it’s allowed.”

Still. It was unusual for them. “This isn’t _him_ , is it?” Bran asked suspiciously.

Leah blinked up at the ceiling. “I… don’t know. Maybe. He can influence things.”

Bran didn’t like that. He pushed himself upright and resolutely ignored the way his wife appreciatively looked at his body. Physical attraction had never been a problem for them from the moment he had first smelled her lemon-scented hair and she had apparently decided he was _exciting_.

That the thought of their first meeting had flickered to the front of his consciousness once again struck Bran as too coincidental. “I think he is.”

“To encourage us to spend the morning in bed together? Niche,” Leah said, sighing. Nevertheless, she sat up herself and stretched. “I’m going to shower. I’d like you to take my invitation to join me at face value but that’s entirely up to you.”

Despite himself, Bran did join her because he was no fool and so when the doorbell rang – Charles, who had wisely erred on the side of caution and left it several hours – he wasn’t quite dressed yet. He threw on yesterday’s clothes which were still on the floor of his bedroom and went downstairs to let his son in.

“Have you eaten? I’m starving,” Bran said briskly, combing his hands through his damp hair.

Charles quite clearly tucked his tongue into his cheek. “Ah, not as of yet, no...”

“Oh good. Shall we throw something together?” It was a rhetorical question and Bran pushed through into their kitchen and came to an abrupt halt as he surveyed the scene in front of him.

“Woah,” Charles said when he clocked the feast laid out across the kitchen counters. All the kitchen counters.

“Why can I smell… oh, for the love of— _Lars!”_ Leah yelled, entering behind Charles and then making an about-turn to summon her deity.

“We’ve had Thanksgivings with less food than this,” Bran muttered, his mouth watering at the combined scents of meat and potatoes and cheese and every delicious savory item he could think of. He leaned forward to sniff a particularly golden-brown roast chicken, skin crisp and glistening with crystals of salt. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Charles’s fingers reach for a juicy looking slice of brisket that was decoratively laid out on a platter with gravy, piles of potatoes and cornbread. “Don’t eat anything!”

“What, why?” Charles asked, long fingers hovering.

Bran growled and went into the living area where Leah was having a stand-off with their godly houseguest.

“Well, they’re all coming over for Sunday lunch and you were going to be very behind,” Lars was saying. He was no longer wearing his smock but instead wore what genuinely appeared to be a set of light grey sweats and child-size Nike runners.

Leah waved her arms around the empty living area, as if to refute this. “They are? Since when?”

The Roman god pointed to the kitchen. “It’s on the calendar.”

“Oh,” Bran said, realization dawning. His wife looked at him sharply. “He’s right. We agreed on full moon.”

“We?” she snapped, narrowing her eyes.

“ _We_ ,” was his response, with equally narrowed eyes. Bran had long, long learned the lesson about making plans without her input. “ _We_ put it in the calendar so _we_ wouldn’t forget. Which _we_ did.”

Not surprising, particularly, given the circumstances.

A moment later, Leah closed her eyes. Now she remembered.

Charles cleared his throat. “I came by earlier to, ah, see if I could help. Anna’s made a salad though it doesn’t look like we’ll be needing that now and _who is this?_ ” he finished in rising tones. 

The doorbell went. Leah threw her hands up. “I’m going to get changed,” she announced. She was wearing a tight T-shirt and a pair of soft looking blue pajama shorts. Not clothes she would be seen dead wearing around the pack, particularly not when she was hosting Sunday lunch. Her hair was also wet and hanging in a loose plait down to one side, leaving a patch of damp over her left breast that made it clear she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Bran was briefly disappointed that he wasn’t going to be enjoying this outfit for much longer. And _that_ was not a normal thought.

She flounced off upstairs and Bran looked at the Lares. “Thank you,” he said, because it needed to be said. “Also, please stop influencing me.”

The little god’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Then he vanished. Again. Charles made a small, shocked inhalation. “Da. What— what was that?”

Bran sighed. “At this point, I don’t even know where to start. Can you get the door? I’m going to lay the big table.”

*

One of the most cunning things about their feast was that Lars – his wife’s household god who could kill him with a flick of his small hand – had made all of the dishes that Leah regularly did, which meant that it really appeared as if she had got up excruciatingly early to create a meal that rivalled every Christmas they’d ever had combined.

The pack was ecstatic, a casual Sunday lunch arranged at short notice becoming something unexpectedly raucous and celebratory. Leah was repeatedly thanked. Not one to shy away from praise, Leah took it, took it all, but occasionally cast him a look of such withering despair that he had to hide his smile in his napkin.

“Have you noticed,” Leah said, turning her head away from the table to whisper in his ear, “that nothing is getting cold?”

He had not. Extending one finger, he touched the platter nearest to him, a nearly entirely finished bowl of mac and cheese. It was still piping hot. Bran tilted his head towards her, mouth brushing her ear. “Tell me this isn’t going to bite us in the ass,” he replied with a fixed smile on his face, the feeling that this situation was out of his control increasing by the moment.

“We survived the last time,” she pointed out, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself.

This was true. “He doesn’t seem to like me very much.”

“No, he’s never been very keen,” Leah agreed with alacrity. Shaking her head, she stuck her fork directly into the bowl of mac and cheese, helped herself to a heaped portion.

Fantastic, Bran thought. Nothing like a minor deity with an attitude problem. “Why’s that?”

“Oh, he— Well, it didn’t start well, let’s put it that way. And he wasn’t at the wedding,” Leah said, reaching for a bowl of salad greens. “But that was my fault. I invited him to the full moon ceremony but he said it was no place for him.”

“You… invited him to the full moon ceremony?” As was traditional – in those days – they had been mated before they had been married. The wedding had taken place in Aspen Creek. The full moon ceremony had been held in her former pack, hosted by her former Alpha. It had been a long, dragged out experience for Bran who was used to the more perfunctory way of doing things. A _Lares Domestici_ would have certainly livened things up a bit.

Then again, perhaps it would have made Leah _too_ interesting and he had certainly not been looking for an interesting mate. Hmm.

“Yes and then, well, the wedding seemed rather anti-climatic after that. Just a stupid human thing.” Leah shrugged, casting off any lingering notions Bran may have once had about her old-fashioned beliefs. “So I didn’t call him. I should have done. It’s tradition.”

“I thought you wanted to get married. In a church.”

“No. Why would you think that?” Dismissively, she speared a slice of cucumber. “It wasn’t like I was a girl with romantic notions. We were ‘married’ as soon as the mating bonds were in place if not, ah, before.” By which presumably she meant the efficiency of their consummation once she had agreed to being his mate. And he had been _very_ efficient, as in as soon as the word ‘yes’ had passed her lips, he had started removing items of clothing, his and hers. “This dressing is better than mine,” Leah sighed, a sad pout to her mouth.

Part of his mind trying to locate _where_ he had got the idea that Leah had wanted a wedding, part of it suddenly revisiting the noises she made in bed like he was a randy teenager, Bran nevertheless attempted to stay on track. “Why didn’t he think he couldn’t come to the full moon ceremony?”

“Different magic, I think,” Leah said, blithely uninterested. 

He was not going to get what he wanted from her, that was becoming clear. “Do you think you could ask him to speak to me? Just to have a conversation.”

She tilted her head from side to side, considering. “I’ll try.”

*

By the time it was dark, only half of the pack had left and the rest had crowded into the living area to put on a movie. Leah was in her organizational element, orchestrating a vote over which movie that seemed to involve a lot of sticky notes. Bran would be called in only if there was a tie. He ducked into his office for a moment of peace and quiet and the room was definitely empty when he walked in and when he closed the door, it was not. 

“I am here,” Lars announced. He was standing in front of Bran’s fireplace, back to a roaring fire that had also not been lit when Bran had entered. 

Bran thought he took the irritation of a being who could come and go unobserved more successfully than himself very well. Considering. “Thank you for taking the time to speak to me.”

A shrug. “What my girl wants.”

The possessive adjective discombobulated Bran. Leah was his, in the way that all the wolves in North America were his, but also more so. His wolf, his mate, his wife. He had never had to ‘share’ Leah before. He was a selfish man and he did not enjoy it.

Bran took a seat behind his desk, a manifestly superficial attempt to present control over the situation. “I have many questions. How willing are you to answer them?”

“Depends on how willing you are to answer mine.” The dark berry eyes twinkled. It was hard to see expressions on a face that was mostly beard and eyebrows.

“I suppose that’s fair,” Bran said equably, smiling. “How long have you been… with Leah’s family?”

The bushy eyebrows rose. “Since before you were born, Deathbringer. Her people were worshipping at my shrine when the Cornick Witch had yet to make her first kill to fuel her unnatural magics.”

It was odd, that moment. No one spoke of the woman who had born him, Changed him and tortured him and yet made him who he was today. He certainly hadn’t expected it from a Roman godling. He supposed it set a standard of expectations.

He bared his teeth in a facsimile of a smile. “Her clan must have many ancestors keeping you busy.”

“Only those that carry on the old ways. Leah’s father passed down the rituals, just as his grandfather had done, and his mother before him, all the way back to Gaius Servilius Structus.”

Bran wondered where the shrine was in their house, for presumably there was one. Where did his wife put down her offerings to her pagan god? Somewhere he would rarely go, else he would have found it and asked questions. He supposed there were plenty of rooms that might fit the bill. She had an office she rarely – he thought – used. Her walk-in closet, was another one. She could easily have hidden something in there, behind the designer bags or neatly folded sweaters. The laundry was another option. 

He tapped his fingers on his desk. “By the time we met, her parents were long dead, of course. I know she had siblings and nieces and nephews and I presume she has ancestors now as many werewolves do.” 

Given Lars had no discernable sclera, it was hard to tell but Bran thought he rolled his eyes. “A few yes. You have a ‘few’ yourself, prolific as you were.”

Bran narrowed his eyes. “Fewer than you might think.”

“I suppose that depends on your narrative.” He tapped his cheek thoughtfully. “Leaving aside the grandchildren that survived you in Wales, there’s two branches in southern France from twin girls you got on a young widow in the 11th Century. In Spain and Italy, too, you had a handful of bastards. I assume you considered widows to be fair game, well able to take care of themselves. Married women, too. Plenty of babies born to take another man’s surname in Europe and certainly a couple here, before you met your first mate.”

Bran slowly leaned back into his office chair. True, he had been no monk. This was a man’s body and he had a man’s needs fuelled by werewolf desires. And true, as well, that he had never stayed long in one place so had never faced the possible repercussions of his liaisons. He liked to think that even with his then-limited understanding of birth control that he had been reasonably careful.

Hard to be told of the reality, of course. Bran knew precisely the young widow the creature spoke of, too. Could picture her face, even, which galled him because there were some days when he wasn’t absolutely certain he could picture Charles’s mother properly any more. 

The glittering black eyes appraised him and clearly found him wanting. “Oh, yes, I know all there is to know about you, Bran Cornick.”

Since Bran often found himself ‘wanting’, he felt no injury from a stranger’s belief. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had cared what others thought of him. It was only a question of what was right. “Did you ‘know’ this before or after I married Leah?”

“Before, clearly. I warned the girl. I told her she would be unhappy with you. She didn’t listen. Always been a leap-before-you-think type, that one.”

Bran took issue with this. “She is not unhappy.” If he added a quiet _anymore_ to this, only he would know it.

“Is she not? Then why am I here?”

Bran held out his palms. “She truly doesn’t know. Can you really not know either?”

“I’m no mind reader,” Lars grumbled. He climbed into one of Bran’s chairs with surprising elegance given his height. Bran wondered how he got the Nike runners. Did he walk into a store? Order online? “They were a gift. From one of my other girls.”

“No mind reader, eh?”

Lars swung his feet. “No more than you, my boy. Just a matter of noticing the patterns.”

That was true. “So what happens now? If she thinks she has no domestic issue to solve?”

“Then I’m stuck here. Unless someone with greater needs calls for me.”

“Did her need… feel great?” Bran asked, worried. Was it possible Leah had done it unconsciously? _Was_ she unhappy? He generally tried not to consider her emotional state. It never bode well for him.

“I don’t know. It’s true it doesn’t _feel_ quite right.” The bushy eyebrows lowered in obvious thought. “A few years ago there was something. A big blip. I thought she would summon me, then. But she didn’t.”

A few years ago. Bran knew well what that would be. He had thought her a traitor and in doing so betrayed her himself. The following months had been challenging, to say the least. He knew she had seriously considered leaving him. Bran wondered how he would have fared with his mate’s pet deity hanging on her orders. 

Poorly, he suspected.

*

In the end, he called Samuel rather than attempt to revisit the past with any of the Aspen Creek wolves who might have memories long enough. It took several attempts. The first because Bran called him at 2am wherever he was and Sam answered the phone, swore at him, and hung up. The second Bran himself was interrupted by an incoming phone call from Kara’s father. “I’d better take this,” he told a bemused Sam. “The man only calls with bad news.”

Finally, the stars aligned and he was able to speak to his eldest living child.

“When Leah and I met—”

“Uh oh,” Sam interrupted. Leah was not his favorite conversational topic.

Bran frowned. “Let’s try this again. What was my house like?”

“Are we talking architecture…?”

“No. I mean – cleanliness. When we brought Leah back – how would you say we lived?”

“Oh. Ah. Hmm.”

There was a long, thoughtful pause. Bran tapped his fingers on his desk. “Leah implied that she was unprepared.”

“Well, she certainly was _that._ If ever there was a woman less suited for Frontier life, it was Leah.” Sam grunted quickly, as if he could tell that this made Bran prickle with irritation. “To be fair to her, she learned quickly.”

This was true and Bran knew now that as well as having a practical streak, his mate had help.

Encouraged, Bran was beginning to feel that Leah was exaggerating about the circumstances. That Sam hadn’t immediately picked up on it suggested her memory was flawed. He hadn’t liked the thought that he had somehow lived in reduced circumstances. That his emotions had overpowered his sense of decency.

But Sam put paid to that with a thoughtful noise. “Now I think on it, I wonder if she was right. I seem to recall… things seemed to get _better_ once you mated. Not just because of the wolf. But I remember— one of the women. Henry’s wife, do you remember?”

He did not. He remembered Henry though. “Go on.”

“She started to visit with Leah. I remember thinking it odd. That none of the men brought their women before. I assumed it was because there was no lady of the house. But there were flowers on the table, suddenly. And curtains. And pie.”

“Pie.”

“ _Yes.”_ Sam’s tone suddenly lifted. “Pie. Do you remember the pies? God, I can taste the pastry now. That first mouthful of game pie, coming in from the cold, rich with gravy. Oh, it was like nothing else. Nothing even comes close to it.”

Bran took the phone away from his ear to stare at it. “Sam, I can actually hear you salivating.”

“Sorry. I missed breakfast and I’m very hungry. Oh, she made us wash more, Da, do you remember that? And not in the creek but in a hipbath you had to get specially from the general store. With soap.”

 _This_ sparked a memory. Bran sat up as it crystallized like it had been yesterday. “I remember wrestling Charles into it. As both a boy _and_ a wolf pup.”

Sam roared with laughter. “Now _that_ is a memory I am sorry to have forgotten.”

He smiled now because it was a funny image. Funnier still considering the large, meticulous man Charles had grown in to. It hadn’t been amusing at the time – Charles had been half wild and being submerged in a warm bath filled with dried plants and soap had him crawling up the walls. But Leah had insisted and Bran had felt guilty as if she’d had a point. He remembered that. _What must his mother’s family think of me,_ she had complained to him. _Sending this boy back to them caked in dirt and animal entrails._

Bran hadn’t given much thought to what Charles’s maternal relatives thought of Charles’s new step-mother. He hadn’t considered that she _would_ be his step-mother but that was what she was, what she had become. It was a role she had never taken to, he recalled, and Charles had not warmed to her. They were very different people and only now were they really coming to terms with each other.

He sat back. “So she was right,” he sighed.

“I guess she was. I mean – none of us were in the best place.”

Lest he forget. Bran was not the only one to have lost loved ones. Charles had been barely walking when Sam’s wife had died in labor, taking their child with them and leaving Sam behind broken-hearted once more.

It was a bit much, Bran thought. Bringing a woman like Leah had been to a household with two grieving werewolf men and a half-wolf boy. He suddenly felt sorry for his young wife in a way that he had never been before. He couldn’t imagine that Frontier life had lived up to her _exciting_ expectations.

*

With a shyness she rarely displayed, Leah showed him her shrine. It was in her walk-in closet, as he had suspected, and she lit the tea-lights and poured some chocolate chips into a little egg-cup. “He likes those,” she said, without a hint of the ridiculous.

Bran allowed himself the minutest of lip twitches. “What’s this?” He pointed to one of the columns of the tiny wooden temple. He knew what it looked like. It looked like smears of blood.

“That’s my blood. Once you’ve made your shrine, you need to, um, christen it, so to speak. Or at least we did in my family.”

“You made this?” It was very detailed woodworking. On the gable of the pediment there was a carving, very small, of leaves and flowers.

Her smile was soft; the memory was a happy one. “When I was twelve. My brother helped me.”

Bran peered at it more closely. The wood had been well handled over years. Some parts were smoothed with frequent touching. This had been with her since she was a girl and he had never seen it. She had hidden it from him. “Were you worried I would ask you to use him?”

Leah shook her head. “When I met you… in the beginning, I was concerned you would want it destroyed. You don’t trust Other magic.”

She was right. “But this is bigger than Other magic. This is belief,” he said, gently. “This is your religion.”

“We-ell….” Leah said, drawing the word out. “I hardly _practice_. It really is more of a tradition, now, I think.”

Bran decided he would let that go. Her belief was so strong she could manifest an entity to do her bidding. She had a _shrine_ in her closet that she visited daily. He touched the egg cup with the tip of his finger. He had wondered why they went through so many chocolate chips. She seemed to buy bags of the stuff. “He told me he warned you off me.”

“Mmm.”

 _Mmm._ He raised his eyebrows at her and Leah rolled her eyes, blew out the candles and carefully pushed the shrine back, returning the rolled up sweaters to their position obscuring it. “It’s not important, Bran.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you were powerful and dangerous and,” she unnecessarily took a shirt of a hanger and re-ordered it, “truthfully, something of a womanizer.”

“A womanizer,” Bran repeated dourly.

Leah’s returning look was somehow very female. “He didn’t need to tell me _that_ , Bran.”

Bran’s mouth dropped open. He half-laughed. “I am _not_ – _was not –_ a womanizer.”

His wife stared at him, her forehead crumpled. “Bran, back then there were just over thirty unmated female werewolves on the whole of this continent. By the time you met me, you had slept with _all of them._ ”

He spluttered. He, Bran Cornick, a Power in the world, spluttered. “That is—” _Absolutely_ the case, he realized with horror. “I didn’t set out to— I wasn’t just—” Bran put a stop to his attempts to justify himself and forced himself to cease gesticulating wildly. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, scowling.

She was amused, taking pleasure in his discomfort. “And I knew most of them,” she added wryly, twisting the knife a little. “It was a small community; naturally we corresponded. By the time you reached Boston, my Alpha knew what you were doing there. Who you were looking for. I was completely prepared to loathe you and send you on your way.”

Bran sighed. This was lowering. “I can see now how the perception may have been poor.”

“You weren’t, emotionally, in a very good place,” Leah said unusually gently, offering up this excuse to him on a platter for him to take. She was not normally so calm about the women in his past.

He ran his hands through his hair. “No, probably not, but that’s no real excuse.” With a jolt, he realized the long-term implications of this first impression he had unknowingly created across the continent and specifically with his wife. “This is why you—” Bran winced, forced himself to say the words. “Is that why you are so sensitive to other females?”

A flash of anger crossed her face, gone as quickly as it had materialized. “It didn’t _help_. But I know you now.” She tilted her head, nose lifting in the air. “I don’t think you’re looking for _variation_ any more _._ ”

“I am absolutely not looking for variation. I—” Bran paused, catching the words he had been about to say on the tip of his tongue. Sometimes it felt as if his marriage was a no-win situation with what she wanted and what he felt was needed never aligning. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry for _that_.” Leah gave him a pert, flirtatious smile. 

“Oh, there are other things I should be sorry for? I see,” he replied smilingly as she gave him an easy escape from this narrative that he was so uncomfortable with.

“Just so.”

Bran wanted to kiss her, and knew from the angle of her body that she wanted him to, so he did. He walked her out of her closet backwards and tipped her onto her bed so he could kiss her some more, so he could press her into the mattress and they could move together.

No, Bran wasn’t looking for variation. He had denied it for most of their married life but she was everything he wanted and needed now. He could ask for nothing more.

*

“You didn’t call him. After Sage.”

His mate’s face drooped sadly. It was almost comic in its contrast; showed just how much happier she had been before he had mentioned this particular ‘low’ of their relationship. “I nearly did,” she admitted, folding her hands on her bare stomach. “But I was too angry. It— would have been very bad. My father always told us not to call upon him when we were angry.” 

“I would have deserved it,” he told her, surprised at the fervency of his tone.

“Well, I’m not sure you would be laying here if I had,” Leah said drily.

He picked up one of her hands and lifted it to his lips. “Fair,” he said, smiling. “I’m sorry.”

She turned to look at him, eyes wide and lake-blue with honesty. The tip of her index finger traced his chin thoughtfully. “I know. I’ve forgiven you.”

Being forgiven for the act of thinking she could betray him – that she even would – was different than being forgiven for the hurt he had caused her. It wasn’t an old wound yet that she could gloss over. He tugged her towards him, tucked his head next to hers on the pillow and curled an arm around her. Embracing like this was becoming increasingly easier for him, a tender thing he no longer refused himself. “So, what things have you ever asked of Lars, then? What domestic problems has he solved for you?”

“Nothing really. I wanted asked him to change the color of my dress once and he told me off, said it was a trifling thing and I was too vain for my own good,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his nose.

Bran smiled. “What was wrong with the color of your dress?”

“It was white.” Leah met his gaze with a resigned expression, as if she knew he, too, would find this ‘trifling’. “But I wanted it to be pink. _All_ my friends were allowed to wear pink dresses but my mother, quite rightly, refused because she said it made me look sallow.” 

“You were just a girl,” he anticipated. His mate was careful of her appearance but this vanity didn’t exist any more. She used clothes like a weapon now. There was nothing soft or girlish about it. 

“Seventeen. My first year ‘out’.”

So young. Bran didn’t even remember being that young.

It was hard to imagine the kind of life Leah had once led, compared to who and what she was now. Bran’s own humanity was so vague to him. He worked at his ‘humanness’ but it was a purely superficial thing. He wouldn’t leap cars in a crowded parking lot or lift bags of cement with one hand. He minded his contemporary manners and took up current idioms. His clothes were chosen by observing what other young men wore. Short hair, long hair – whatever was the latest trend. He tried to act the age he looked, not the age he really was. This was helped, of course, by the fact that he had forgotten more than he remembered.

“What else?” he asked.

“That’s really it. After that I was more cautious with my requests. When I summoned him here, that first time, that was the first big one.”

When she had wanted to learn to be a good wife to him. He held back a sigh. He had not been a good husband.

Bran pressed his mouth to her temple. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For caring.”

She made a dismissive noise. “I just cared what everyone else thought of me.”

Bran knew her well. Knew that might have been part of it. But Leah was a perfectionist, at heart. She didn’t start anything without the intent of finishing it. “You really intended to send me packing, hmm?” he asked, attempting to lighten the tone.

“Absolutely. I had no intention of being another conquest.”

He grinned and rubbed his foot against her calf. He stroked his palm up to a breast, circled a puckered nipple with his finger, then treated the other to the same. “But you thought me exciting.”

“Yes.” She pursed her lips, as if daring him to become smugger. “Little did I realize,” she said acidly as he bent his head to replace his finger with his mouth, “that two hundred years—oh!” With a gasp, Leah sat bolt upright, dislodging him entirely. “Lars!” she yelled.

“Leah, Jesus,” Bran said, grabbing hold of the comforter shoved towards the end of her bed and pulling it up to cover them both. Nudity in front of strangers, fine. _Clearly_ post-coital and, as he had been hoping, _coital_ nudity, no.

The Lares manifested on top of the cedar trunk that Leah kept at the end of her bed, into which each night she stored all the throws and pillows that she assured him was the height of bedding fashion but he just seemed to spend his entire time _removing_.

Bran was given a malevolent glare and then ignored. He was numb to it now.

“Yes, _verculum?_ ” Lars was wearing another pair of sweats, this time a dark green. The pants were tucked into a pair of Ugg boots.

“I’ve worked it out,” she said eagerly, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “I _did_ call you.”

Drawing his eyes away from the Uggs, Bran looked askance at her. “You did?”

“Not now, though.” Leah beamed triumphantly, including them both in her smile. It was capitivating. “It was two hundred years ago. I said – _come back in two hundred years and see how we’re doing_. I remember.”

“Ah! So you did.” Lars clicked his thumb and finger together. “ _Well done_. And?”

She gestured between herself and Bran. “We’re fine, I think,” she said, to Bran’s relief.

Though, he then reflected, ‘fine’ was a bit of a disappointing understatement.

“Marvelous.” Lars put his hands on his hips and sighed. “That is a relief. I’ll make no bones about it, I was truly baffled.”

“Me too.”

The little deity hopped off the trunk, headed towards her closet. “I’ll be off then.”

“Thank you for coming back,” Leah said sweetly. “You can always drop by. Anytime you want.”

Bran gave her an appalled look. _Really?_ he mouthed at her.

Lars waved a hand airily. “Oh, I’ll be back when you have your firstborn.”

Bran’s head swiveled to him in horror. “What? _What?_ ” he demanded. But Lars was gone. “What did he mean _when?_ ” he now demanded of his mate, pointing to the space where her deity had been.

“I’m sure it’s just an expression, Bran,” Leah said, rolling her eyes at what she no doubt considered to be his ‘dramatics’. She lay back down, tugging the comforter over her more fully and turned her back on him, snuggling into the pillow for all the world as if her troubles were over.

Bran gave himself a good talking to. “It’s not possible,” he told himself, closing his eyes. “It’s not.”

Unless, of course, she asked for it?

He leaned over her. “Leah? What if you asked? What if you _just thought about it?_ Leah?”

End


End file.
